Fear

Epilogue

I've been sitting here for the past five days wondering how on earth I can sum up everything in this book. How to start this and end it.

Of course, for me, it doesn't end when the cover is closed.

You'll read this, finish it, put it down. You may think about it for a while if it resonates, but then you'll carry on with your life.

I'm still here. In the same shithole, in the same gilded cage, with the man who kidnapped me.

It's been about a year since I started writing. A year since the pen first hit the page.

I wrote the whole thing in chronological order, remembering every single thing and every minute detail like it happened yesterday. And I'd like to say that putting pen to paper and relieving myself of the burden was easy.

But in short, it was painful. Very painful.

Some days, I had to steady my hand on the page during the worst scenes and tried not to cry.

Sometimes, I'd be so engrossed I'd forget to eat and my fingers cramped until the words blurred together.

There were also pages I skipped entirely and came back to later, once continuing felt more survivable.

And there were parts I never wanted to return to at all — names I hesitated over, moments I tried to soften, only to realise that doing so felt like another kind of lie.

Some nights, I'd finish a chapter and just sit there with the notebook closed on my lap or table, breathing through the aftershocks and flashbacks.

I learned to listen to the limits of my own endurance. That was new, something I'd never done before.

Writing this didn't give me peace. Not in the way people like to imagine it does. It didn't purge the pain, or close the wound, or offer me any grand revelation about resilience.

What it did was give shape to something that had been living inside me without boundaries. It gave the memories somewhere to sit that wasn't just in my head.

That matters more than I realised at the time.

—

I started writing at chapter one. The prologue was actually an afterthought much later, and written on a separate sheet of paper with the thought that, if I ever did publish, I'd add it in.

At the time, I didn't know how else to begin. Starting with Isabel and context felt better than just saying, "I went to a club and met a creepy guy."

I knew I had to, before memory could rearrange itself, before time sanded the edges down into something more bearable and therefore less true. I wrote in the order things happened, but not necessarily in the order they made sense. Memory is slippery. Trauma even more so. Writing was the only way I knew how to anchor myself to reality without losing it completely.

—

You already know the broad strokes of what happened to me. I don't need to rehearse them here. I was taken. I was held captive. I was hurt in an insurmountable number of ways. I survived things I shouldn't have had to survive, by cruel people who convinced themselves they were justified. I learned how quickly fear can become routine. How easily a person can adapt to a cage if the bars are arranged well enough.

There was an institution hidden under a house. There were men who watched. Men who participated. Men who claimed to help. There were rules and punishments and something they called treatment.

There were also people I met along the way. And this is something I wanted to get down, because I acknowledge that there are some loose ends.

There are faces from the institution that still surface when I least expect them to. Not in dreams. Not dramatically. Just flashes — a voice, a fleeting thought, a memory. They don't come with meaning attached.